Germany’s Central Bank Backs Study of Role in Nazi Crimes

FRANKFURT — In November 1941, Karl Blessing, the executive in charge of the Nazi petroleum monopoly wrote a letter to a deputy of Adolf Hitler’s chief architect. An apartment belonging to Jews in Berlin was opening up, and the executive wanted it.

After the war, Blessing became president of Germany’s central bank. He was a legendary figure who helped shape its hard-line focus on inflation.

The letter, however, undercuts his image as a Nazi resister and hints at some of the uncomfortable revelations that could emerge from a new research project, which will explore in greater detail than ever before the involvement of German central bankers with the Hitler regime. The German central bank, the Bundesbank, announced on Friday that it will fund the study, which will take four years to complete.

It has become a ritual for German companies and government institutions to hire historians to root into their dark pasts. Deutsche Bank published a study of its conduct during the Third Reich in 1998. Volkswagen published one in 1996.

The Bundesbank’s historical soul searching comes late, in part, because previous generations of bank managers either had something to hide or were reluctant to stir up information that might hurt the bank’s credibility, said Albrecht Ritschl, a professor at the London School of Economics. He will lead the research project along with Magnus Brechtken, deputy director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.

Central bank archives have long been accessible to researchers and there have been numerous studies of the Reichsbank, as the central bank was known before Germany’s defeat in World War II. But, Mr. Ritschl said, “some unpleasant questions were not asked.”

The answers could provoke hard feelings even today. The historians will study the Reichsbank’s role in economic exploitation of occupied countries during the Nazi regime, which was marked by “indescribable cruelty and cynicism,” Mr. Ritschl said.

The researchers will draw on foreign central bank archives that have not been thoroughly examined before. During the occupation of Greece by Germany and Italy, for example, the Reichsbank helped engineer runaway inflation that wiped out the value of the local currency and created a famine. Revelations could fuel resentment in modern Greece, where many people blame Germany for the austerity policies imposed on the country since 2010.

Mr. Brechtken discovered Blessing’s request for a Jewish-owned apartment while researching a new biography of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect that was published in June. In 1941, Blessing was chief executive of Kontinentale Öl, a company formed to exploit oil reserves in conquered countries.

The Nazis were systematically evicting German Jews from their homes and forcing them into communal dwellings with other Jews, from which they were later deported to ghettos or concentration camps. Vacated houses and apartments were then handed out as “goodies” to favored officials and businessmen, Mr. Brechtken said.

Blessing’s request that such an apartment be allocated to Kontinentale was an indication that he was well aware of the persecution of the Jews and anxious to claim a share of the assets. Mr. Brechtken said it is not clear what happened with the apartment, but that such requests were typically granted.

The letter challenges Blessing’s image as an anti-Nazi. Indeed, the German officers who tried and failed to kill Hitler in 1944 had planned to name Blessing as central bank president or economics minister of a new government.

The Bundesbank study will be exhaustive, comprising eight volumes when it is finished. One flaw with many previous corporate and government studies is that they run to thousands of pages of dense German, making them inaccessible — perhaps deliberately so — to anyone not fluent in the language.

But Mr. Ritschl and Mr. Brechtken said their research will be translated in its entirety into English. Under the current generation of Bundesbank managers — the president, Jens Weidmann, is 49 — “there is much more openness,” Mr. Ritschl said.